A Possible Solution to the Disagreement about the Hubble Constant

Abstract

The current disagreement about the Hubble constant H 0 was described as a “Crisis in Cosmology”, at the April (2018) Meeting of the American Physical Society, and hence its resolution is of utmost importance. This work proposes that the solution to the disagreement between the Planck Collaboration cosmic microwave background (CMB) value of H 0 , together with the very close BOSS Collaboration baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) value, and the significantly higher value of H 0 found by the SHOES Collaboration cosmic distance ladder (CDL) work, is due to the fact that the CMB and BAO values of H 0 are not for an accelerating universe, as generally believed, but are actually the values for a decelerating universe. In contrast, the CDL value of H 0 is indeed that for an accelerating universe. It is shown that by replacing the negative deceleration parameter in the expression for log H 0 in the CDL work by a positive deceleration parameter, the value of H 0 can be brought down to agree with the CMB and BAO lower values. There is a brief review of the author’s decelerating model based on the Einstein de Sitter universe, augmented by a model of dark energy that does not have a negative pressure, but instead has a non-dispersive index of refraction n , causing the speed of light through the dark energy of intergalactic space to be reduced to c/n . As reported earlier, this assumption is sufficient to accommodate the increase in apparent magnitude of the Type Ia supernovae (SN e Ia). Additional support for the model is presented, together with a proposal for astronomical falsification.